On a less violent - though also very tragic - issue:
Missing women.
(I know, it's random, but I was going to name the previous post 'missing weapons' as a pun on 'missing women' then I realised it was not funny. So i decided to write a real post instead.
So how many missing women are we talking about?
100 million women. That's a lot. Only they're not kidnapped or anything of the sort: they are just not there. They may have died in their early years, or never been born, but they 'should have' been there.
Ok, this doesn't make much sense. Go back to December 1990. Amartya Sen (Nobel laureate in Economics, professor at Cambridge U) coins the expression "missing women" to designate the gender imbalance in developing countries, which have a lower female:male ratio that the world average (and the developed country average).
He posits that 'bias in relative care' is the problem: families take better care, in education, medicine, and even food of their male kids - so the females are more likely to die in childhood. Sen calculated that 44 million women were 'missing' in China, 37 million in India, and so on.
This article creeped me out. Are we, humans, parents, so BAD? Do we discriminate THAT MUCH between our own children??
The theory still stands, to a large extent for lack of counterarguments.
But a Harvard PhD student (then) - now a U Chicago professor, named Emily Oster, came up with a different theory: she said that women with Hepatitis B were more likely to give birth to baby boys than girls. She ran experiments, gathered data to prove her idea. Got her Harvard PhD for it. Nice, huh? Her publication on the topic - for the Journal of Political Economy - is here.(She now works on HIV Aids in Africa - brilliant work but i kinda disagree. another post, perhaps).
But in any event, I totally see a John Bates Clark medal coming up for this one very, very soon. Inevitable. (remember, you read it here first).
So Oster claims that her theory explains, say, half the 'missing women' of Sen.
Another different theory, by Avraham Ebenstein (of Berkeley, I believe), whose finds that unnaturally high male-to-female ratios occur only for children born after the first-born. Not sure what that means -- perhaps that the ratio is actually skewed with fertility rate increases? Still have to read his paper. You should, though.
In any event, 2 conclusions:
a) even if we have alternative theories to gender discrimination, that doesn't make the problem any less serious. Add to it that we are now seeing an increase in selective abortions when pre-natal reports show the gender of the child -- so much that India BANNED the disclosure of the fetus' gender. Chilling, if you ask me.
There is a very, very severe problem of discrimination against women and girls that must be addressed.
b) I'm a new fan of Oster :-D People like her remind me why I did econ - and why I must keep on working in economics.
4 comments:
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Heyz. I seem to have trouble accessing her paper (she whom you've now become a fan of) any chance you can mail me the document? Hope life has been treating you alright. Have inquries about the e-mail you sent. Do you need interns?
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I am sure Ostens theory is not taken from thin air, however unless she can prove that of the 100 million missing women, half of their mothers had hep B, well then it would be hard to say that it can explain half the missing women.
In india people have been going to streetside opened ultrasound clinics for years, if not more. For 50 dollars they can get to know the gender of the baby, this may be outlawed in public hospitals but it is by far not non existent or unacessible for the general public. It is a market.
In both Pak and India, and I would assume in general around the subcontinent, it is not uncommon in poorer villages (sometimes not even poor villages) to let the men and boys eat first, and the rest is left to the womenfolk to make due with.
Add to that deaths due to lack of education on sanitation and nutrition (though it would affect both boys and girls, due to the fact that boys have access to more food it is likely that their immune system is slightly stronger).
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